29Oct 10

Sinead O’Connor is one of the finest song interpreters not just because she thinks hard about the material and the feelings locked in it, but because she’s so good at placing songs into a situation. A great example of this is her version of “Chiquitita”, warm and homely where ABBA’s is melodramatic, replacing its theatrical flourishes with a cosy tick-tock rhythm like a parlour clock. In the video she makes you, the viewer-as-Chiquitita, a cup of tea and settles down for a chat, and it’s perfect: that’s exactly what her version feels like.

This ability to find an angle gives her cover versions life and variety: she’s happy to switch up her singing style as the track demands, she’s never reliant on one-size-fits-all passion. She can belt with the best of them – think of her “You’re killing me!” ranting on “Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home”. But she’s also happy to keep her distance if that’s what the song needs. This is why the famous video for “Nothing Compares For You” – tight close-up on O’Connor’s face, a tear sliding down her cheek, her spitting some words and flinching from others – can be misleading. It makes you think the record is brilliant because of its raw, unsimulated emotion: but really it’s more subtle than that, and the artifice of the video’s framing is as much a tell as those two teardrops.

Her “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a very moving track – it captures the stasis, anger and devastation of a bad break-up with awful accuracy – but it seems to me Sinead comes to that emotion through very calculated vocal choices, particularly the shifts between a gentle vocal tone and one more edged and occasionally so harsh it almost sounds treated. Take the chorus, for instance – it builds up as a big soft rock sweep: “But nothing compares…” – and then starts to zig-zag, O’Connor picking out individual syllables – “no-THING! com-pares” – before blurring the last two into a single stabbing cry – “TOYEW”.

How does this way of singing work with the grain of the song? “Nothing Compares 2 U” is – at least partly – about control and its limits. The singer has freedom and autonomy, she knows exactly how long she’s hurt for and is withering about others’ attempts to advise or alleviate it. By the end of the song she’s acting like it’s her choice whether he comes back or not – and this coda is the record’s prettiest and most desperate moment. So the ultra-precise vocals on “Nothing Compares” dramatise this. And they allow for some magical moments – the hopelessness of “I can see whoever I choose“, and the showy melisma on “whatever I want” and “restaurant” underlining their pointlessness in a life where all activity has become decorative and empty. The defiant, then trailing “every boy I see“. The chilling first line. And – of course – “GUESS what he told me!”

I haven’t even mentioned the music, whose stately, sympathetic pulse gives O’Connor the canvas she needs to be so devastating. Compare it to the Prince-produced original by The Family and you can easily see the work this rich, understated backing is doing – the melody is there on the Family’s version but the production strands it by turning the song’s sorrow into a fog. Everything about Sinead O’Connor’s track is clear, by contrast. But there’s still something irreducibly private about it, this portrait of a woman whose grief is all she has to hold onto.

Comments

Re: 148. Actually, now that the age of Kylie & Jive Bunny has passed, Tom has a real problem in replacing the Popular masthead between 1990 and 1993, when Take That start having a string of chart-toppers. Over those three and a half years only two acts had more than one number one, one of whom we’ve already got up to. The other one had three number ones between 1991 and 1993, and are more usually thought of as a 1970s/80s band…

Agree that Sinead is a wonderful interpreter of words and has a haunting voice. Her vocals on Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel is a great example. She’s beyond kooky but I think its a shame that she slipped off the sanity boat as she had more to give.

@155: Speaking as a woman, Marcello, I beg to dissent from your no-doubt well-intentioned defence of my sex. Of course any woman has the right to speak her mind, but the quality of the output is variable to say the least. Melanie Philips is a woman who speaks her mind, and I enjoy reading her Daily Mail column for laughs (online obviously, I wouldn’t pay good money for such a rag) but I would have no compunction about describing her as “beyond kooky” and “off the sanity boat”.

And I agree, that is the direction Sinéad O’Connor increasingly leaned the more she found herself in the limelight.

god this song is so beautiful. One of the first songs I remember hearing. I was a pretty introspective kid & loved listening to ballads like this & staring out the window (i was 5)

You know who did a decent version of this? Jimmy Scott. I have a real thing for “late voices”: singers whose voice has survived, not quite intact, a little fucked, towards the end of their career. Scott’s “Holding back the years” album is an example; also late-period Billie Holiday, Leonard Cohen, Bryan Ferry, even Scott Walker kinda. There are other great examples but I have forgotten them all. Remind me!

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